Invision Community 5: Topic Summaries

Whether you have hours to browse a community or are short on time, scrolling through a very long topic can be more than a little frustrating when you want to follow the topic's core journey.

Recently, we discussed another feature designed to help support-based communities find helpful answers quickly, but what about social topics that do not have a simple question-and-answer format?

We've all come to a lengthy topic for the first time and found it a little intimidating to find the most relevant content among hundreds of posts, which don't always further the topic. These off-topic posts are important because they help social cohesion and build relationships between members at the time of posting. Still, those visiting later often want the truth of the topic.

Invision Community 5 brings a topic summary feature designed to make the most of your time.

The topic summary is generated by an algorithm that uses many touch points such as average read times, reactions, number of shares, external linking and more to determine how useful a post is via a numeric ranking.

The summary shows an estimated read time of the entire topic and an estimated read time using the summary, which gives your members a good idea of the time they'll save.

A shorter read time will make longer topics more accessible to a greater audience.

Adjusting the summary
We believe that algorithms should be used to support human decisions but not override them. Those with permission can add posts from the summary if they feel they are more relevant. Likewise, posts can be removed if you think they are irrelevant.

Interactions with Helpful Posts
Invision Community supports a broad range of communities, including support-based and social communities. We are improving our toolset to help both.

You can have helpful post-voting enabled as well as topic summaries enabled. When this is the case, the topic summary will show until the helpful post-voting meets a threshold. Once that threshold is met, the helpful post information will replace it.

Of course, not all communities and not every forum will have the support features enabled, meaning the topic summary will be the only way to reduce the topic complexity.

Less is more
Browsing the summary gives you a concise view of the topic's journey with no distractions, a vital strategy for growth. 

By allowing members to focus on the core journey, you reward the time they spend on your community and make it more accessible for those short on time.

We hope you've enjoyed this feature introduction and would love to hear your thoughts!